Race, Politics, Riots, and Justice

By Alan Caruba

When I heard the Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey announce that second degree murder charges would be brought against George Zimmerman, my first thought was that she was enhancing her resume in the hopes of becoming a judge someday.

By now everyone knows that the 28-year-old Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26 in Sanford, Florida. The media have been meticulous in describing Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” and Martin as an “African-American.” The Sanford police thought the incident was so transparently a case of self-defense they initially declined to arrest Zimmerman. Moreover, Florida has a law that empowers a citizen in fear of his life to respond with force.

Case closed, right? Wrong, very wrong. As word of the incident spread it became a cause celeb for every race-monger on either side of the black-white dividing line, but especially for people like Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson who were on the first available flight to Florida.

The Zimmerman-Martin case revealed how sharply divided whites and blacks in America still are since the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While strides have been made in the nearly fifty years since then to ensure equality before the law, a relative minority of the black community, some 13% of the U.S. population, has demonstrated progress. By almost any measurement of social disfunction African Americans lead all other races in America.

Walter E. Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, identified the problem in a recent commentary, saying “there’s a larger issue that few people understand or have the courage to acknowledge, namely that black and young have become synonymous with crime, and, hence, suspicion. To make that connection does not make one a racist.”

Williams quoted a black, former chief of police of Charleston, S.C., Reuben Greenberg, who said “The greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality.” Another black, former police chief, Bernard Parks of Los Angeles, has said “It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime.”

At this stage in the unfolding drama, a poll cited in an April 12 Reuters news report indicated that “Americans are deeply divided by race over the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, with 91% of African-Americans saying he was unjustly killed, while just 35 percent of whites thought so, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Thursday.”

And therein lies the real story and a very sad one at that. Beyond that divide lies the politics evoked by the incident that included the President of the United States saying, “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.” This is the second time the President has inserted himself in a story of the arrest of a black American. Presidents are not supposed to do this, especially if they are trained lawyers and alleged experts on the Constitution. It instantly politicized the case.

An April 13 Rasmussen poll revealed that “Americans are slightly less sure that the man who shot black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin is guilty of murder, but more convinced that he’ll be found guilty of that crime. However, a sizeable number still remains unsure about what happened and what will happen in the days ahead. Thirty percent (30%) of American adults now believe George Zimmerman should be found guilty of murder…but twenty-four percent (24%) think Zimmerman acted in self-defense.”

Fortunately the case will be decided in a court of law, not by public opinion.

The famed attorney, Alan Dershowitz was asked on a MSNBC segment what he thought of the case and he expressed the view that the indictment was of dubious merit. That brings me back to my initial reaction to Angela Corey’s self-aggrandizing decision and performance.

Aside from her personal stake in the action taken, I had to wonder how much of the decision was based on the fear of race riots such as those in 1992 when the Los Angeles police officers who sought to subdue Rodney King were acquitted; the two days of rioting in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1996, when a black youth was fatally wounded by police officer after being stopped for speeding; the 2001 riots in Cincinnati following the shooting of an unarmed young black male during a police foot pursuit; and the 2009 riots in Oakland, California following a similar fatal shooting by a BART transit policeman.

You can virtually put money on the likelihood that riots will occur no matter what the outcome of the indictment of Martin Zimmerman. They will not advance the cause of justice.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

There is No First Amendment Without a Second Amendment

By Alan Caruba

When we celebrate the Fourth of July, let’s keep in mind that the first Americans won their independence from England with the force of arms. It was, in fact, a British effort in 1775 to confiscate military arms they believed were stored in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts that sparked the war.

The Founding Fathers were so aware of the need for an armed citizenry that, after ensuring freedom of religion, speech, press and the right to peacefully assemble in the First Amendment, the Second guaranteed their right to bear arms.

Wherever authoritarian regimes were established in the last century, they took away this right and then proceeded to kill those deemed enemies of the state.

At this point in American history, the Obama administration constitutes a threat to the Constitution in general and the Second Amendment in particular.

More than 80,000,000 Americans are gun owners.

Two of the organizations that have been fighting to protect these rights are the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), both led by Alan M. Gottlieb. Three quarters of the SAF budget is devoted to defending rights pertaining to the ownership of guns and to carry them for self-defense.

In March, the Huffington Post had an article titled “Obama Looking for Ways Around Congress on Gun Policy” by Sam Stein. “Faced with a Congress hostile to even slight restrictions of Second Amendment rights, the Obama administration is exploring potential changes to gun laws that can be secured strictly through executive action, administration officials, say.”

Since then we have learned of a U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms program, Fast and Furious, that actually facilitated the sale and transfer of guns to Mexico. How demented is that?

In May in my home state of New Jersey the SAF won a decision against officials for the deprivation of civil rights under the color of law when they had ruled that an applicant for a concealed carry permit had not demonstrated a “justifiable need” for it. In point of fact, the applicant, Philip Muller, had been kidnapped by members of a motorcycle gang who threatened to kill him. They had, however, grabbed the wrong man.

Despite support by local and state police, action on his application was delayed for six months. Morris County Superior Court Judge David Ironson issued a directive that a permit should be granted. The case is still on-going with other plaintiffs that include a part-time sheriff’s deputy, an applicant who carries large amounts of cash in his private business, and a civilian employee of the FBI with legitimate concerns of an attack from a radical Islamic group.

Currently nearly thirty such cases have either been brought or joined by SAF to stop abuses of this most fundamental right of American citizens ranging from bans on interstate handgun sales, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s imposition of a $340 fee for a permit to keep a handgun in one’s home, and a Chicago ban on gun ranges open to the public. These cases cost between $60,000 and $80,000 each!

The greatest single threat to gun ownership right now is a United Nations “Small Arms Treaty” falsely identified as an “international arms control treaty” allegedly to fight terrorism.”

“In reality,” says Gottlieb, it is “a massive, global gun control scheme. It’s a sham. It’s a fraud.” If the U.S., under the Obama administration and with the consent of the Senate, were to sign on to this treaty, it would nullify the Second Amendment.

Suffice to say that the Obama administration wants to have the power to increase federal fees on guns and ammunition, to ban guns that are imported, to extend the waiting periods for permits, to ban the use of guns on all government property, and even to make it illegal if you own a gun and smoke!

Americans do not have to “justify” gun ownership. It is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The reality is that enemies of this fundamental rights continue to wage an assault on it.

For information about SAF visit http://www.saf.org/ and CCRKBA at http://www.ccrkba.org/.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

World's Largest Army?

Here's a news item from the editor of The Tribune, a weekly newspaper published in North Carolina.

The World's Largest Army. America's Hunters?

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That's great. There were over 600,000 hunters. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world -- more men under arms than Iran ; more than France and Germany combined -- deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan 's 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia  and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world. America will forever be safe from foreign invasion of troops with that kind of home-grown firepower.

Hunting - it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security!

Our Stealth Congress

By Alan Caruba

We are living in an era in which our Congress and much of our government operates like a stealth bomber, destroying rights we assume to be protected by the U.S. Constitution and otherwise encumbering an ailing economy in ways known to make it worse.

Take, for example, the House passage yesterday of the Dream Act, an end-run around the widespread opposition to any form of amnesty for the problem of illegal immigration. While 38 Democrats joined Republicans to vote no on the measure, eight Republicans “crossed the aisle” to support Pelosi, Reid and Obama. The Senate is scheduled to take up the measure on December 9 and it is widely predicted it will fail in that chamber.

Even a massive rejection by the voters appears to have made no impact on the Democrat Party which gives every indication of not giving a damn about We the People even when a million showed up in Washington to protest Obamacare. One is reminded of Speaker Pelosi’s now classic statement that we would have to wait to find out what is in the Obamacare legislation until after the vote was taken.

The result is an increasing number of waivers from aspects of this noxious law for unions, fast food chains, and others to ensure their members and employees do not lose health insurance. This from a bill we were told would extend health insurance to thirty million more Americans.

So the Democrat majority, most of whom did not even bother to read the 2,000-plus monstrosity, voted to have the government take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy and destroy the patient-doctor relationship and just about everything else that made our health system the best in the world.

While Americans were making plans for Christmas and beginning to feel the sting of winter as far south as Florida, Congress voted to approve the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a government created entity that will impose huge tax increases on companies in the northeast in the name of preventing a “global warming” that is not happening.

RGGI is the nation’s first mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) cap and trade regulating entity even though the Cap-and-Trade Act is all but dead in the Senate. Everyone living in ten northeastern states will see their electricity bills soar due to caps on how much GHG their utilities and other major manufacturing facilities emit. This is, I would remind you, is occurring in the midst of the worst recessionary period since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This is equivalent to the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government entities that created the housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis.


The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is concluding its latest and hopefully last conference in Cancun, Mexico, desperately trying to save the Kyoto Protocols. Widely seen as the end of the “global warming” hoax, the UN is far from finished trying to impose its will on the United States and other nations.

As this is written, the Obama administration is trying to get the U.S. to ratify the UN Small Arms Treaty. This is a major goal before it folds its tent in 2012. If the Senate were to ratify the treaty, some 90 million Americans would be required to turn in any banned firearms to local government “collection and destruction” centers. It would prohibit firearm and ammunition manufacturers from selling their products to Americans. In short, it would negate the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

This is yet another stealth effort to undermine the U.S. Constitution, along with all the talk about putting government limits on Internet use and dangerous babble coming out of the FCC to impose a “value” system to determine what radio and television stations can report as news.

As this is written, Americans are still waiting to learn whether their taxes will rise or whether tax rates that have been in place for a decade will be extended. Even so, the President claimed that it was the GOP that was holding Americans “hostage.”

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” is not a cliché. It has never been more true than our present times.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Orwellian EPA

By Alan Caruba

Every time I conclude that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot get crazier, they demonstrate they are not only crazy, but a continued threat to the health, national security, and the right of Americans to be free of incessant governmental intrusion into their lives and choices.

Mind you, they get lots of help from environmental organizations and the latest example was a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity asking the EPA to ban lead shot and bullets under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

There is, of course, no doubt that if you take a bullet to the brainpan, it is very likely to be lethal, but under the TSCA, it is not considered or defined as toxic.

Citing the TSCA as to when the EPA can regulate “chemical substances”, the National Rifle Association, in a letter to the EPA administration noted that “Congress explicitly excluded from this definition ‘any article the sale of which is subject to the tax imposed by section 4181 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986’” or as we call them, bullets!

Not being a lawyer, but being a longtime gun owner, my question to the EPA is this: How CRAZY do you have to be to even consider banning the manufacture, sale, and use of AMMUNITION?

By 2005, three out of ten Americans were gun owners. Since the election of Barack Obama, there has been a noticeable increase in gun sales.

Among gun owners, some are hunters, some are into sport shooting, and some are homeowners or apartment dwellers who want the kind of protection a gun provides while waiting for the police to show up. There are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons to own a gun and the last time I checked the Second Amendment said you could.

In its letter to the EPA, the NRA pointed out that “This appears to be the first time since TSCA’s inception in 1976 that anyone has suggested that EPA may regulate projectiles used in firearms under the Act”, adding that it was manifestly clear that it was “congressional intent that TSCA not be a vehicle to implement gun control.”

The good news is that the EPA abandoned any further action regarding this perfectly insane effort to backdoor an effort to thwart our Second Amendment rights.

The EPA has already determined how much water can be used in your toilet bowl and wants to control how much water you use to shower. It has been instrumental in getting the incandescent light bulb banned from future sales and use. And it wants to legally define puddles after a rainstorm as navigable waters that boats and ships can sail upon.

Perhaps, however, you did not heard that the EPA is considering cracking down on DUST? Specifically farm dust.

On July 23, a number of farm state senators sent a letter to the EPA to indicate just how stupid and detrimental any additional regulation of dust would be. They called the proposal “the most stringent and unparalleled regulation of dust in our nation’s history.” Suffice it to say that livestock kick up dust, the use of combines to harvest crops on a dry day kicks up dust, or just driving a truck down a gravel road will kick up dust.

The EPA is about one thing and one thing only, CONTROL.

Toward that end they are perfectly happy to put their snout into any aspect of life in America to see if they can extend their authority. No one is arguing that America should not have clean air and clean water, but the extent to which the EPA has taken its original mandates is galactic and Orwellian.

The EPA is the very definition of BIG GOVERNMENT run amok.

I am still looking for the word “environment” in the U.S. Constitution.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Revolt of the States

By Alan Caruba

President Obama, his weird circle of advisors (czars), and the ideologues within the Democrat Party led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid only have a few months left to completely destroy the separation of powers between the States and the federal government.

A major battle is looming over the Tenth Amendment which declares that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Almost everywhere one looks today, the States are in rebellion to the overreaching of the federal government. The process involved is called nullification, a legal theory that a U.S. State has the right to nullify, i.e., invalidate, any federal law deemed unconstitutional. Since the Supreme Court moves at a glacial pace, the States through their legislatures have taken the lead in many cases.

Nullification is not secession as in the case of the Civil War, but there is a history of nullification that includes the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both argued that the States are the ultimate interpreters of the Constitution, arguing that the States could “interpose” themselves to protect their citizens from unconstitutional national laws.

Much of the discord in the nation today has its roots in the vital difference between a conservative attachment to traditional values and a liberal ideology that would impose a One World Government on our sovereign nation.

The great philosopher of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote “True conservatism is the antithesis of ideology. It is the negation of ideology. For conservative is grounded in the past. Its principles are derived from the Constitution, experience, history, tradition, custom, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us—‘the best that has been thought and said.’ It does not purport to know the future. It is about preserving the true, the good, the beautiful. Conservatism views all ideologies with skepticism, and the more zealous and fanatic with hostility.”

A case in point is the way that State after State has lined up to oppose through the courts and by individual legal action the imposition of the president’s healthcare legislation, passed on strict party lines by the Democrat Party and only after the most vile revelations of bribery and backroom deals. It is a bill whose content Speaker Pelosi said Americans should supinely consider only after it was passed.

There has been a rapidly growing awareness and rejection of the assertion that the federal government can “own” General Motors or that the government should be in the business of buying and selling mortgages.

Pending financial reform legislation would permit the federal take over any company to install its own board of directors and thus control the economy. The failure to exercise existing regulation of the financial sector hardly calls for more regulation. It calls for stronger enforcement of existing laws.

The increasing awareness and rejection of the false “theory of global warming” is being rejected on the basis of the widely perceived cooling of the earth during this decade and the wild projections of warming 25, 50, a hundred or more years into the unknown future. More and more Americans now know it is based on feeble and deliberately false “computer models”.

That is why the Cap-and-Trade bill, a huge tax on energy use, awaiting action in the Senate, even if imposed in the same fashion as the healthcare bill, will be rejected by the States. There is no need to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural gas that has nothing to do with “warming”, but a rogue government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, is set to assert this falsehood through massive regulation that will destroy the nation’s economic base.

With increasing pace, the States are demanding that the Second Amendment protecting the right to own and bear arms be respected and asserting their right to pass laws permitting gun ownership, including the right to carry concealed arms for self defense. States that have enacted such laws have seen a dramatic decrease in crime.

The assertion of unconstitutional federal powers lies at the heart of the State’s rejection of these efforts. Unfunded federal mandates are bankrupting the States and they want an end to them. The rapacious taking of State lands is crippling theirs and the nation’s ability to access our natural resources.

A growing spectrum of federal laws intruding upon the sovereignty of individual States is being challenged and this is a good thing. We should all take heart from these challenges as well as the spontaneous occurrence of the Tea Party movement that is a dramatic demonstration that the spirit of individual liberty and of States rights is alive and well in America.

A new generation of Americans is learning that the Constitution was designed to ensure a small and limited federal government and that the States, like the Union, are individual republics.

The battle has been joined.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Assaults on the Second Amendment

By Alan Caruba

While Americans are still wary of making big purchases such as a new home, they are investing heavily in guns and ammunition. The sales are off the charts and this may have something to do with why the Founding Fathers, after protecting free speech, free press, and the right to peacefully assemble to protest, made the right to keep and bear guns the Second Amendment.

Right after 9/11 Americans similarly went out and bought guns and ammunition. When Americans get scared, they get guns. The first months of the Obama administration have given many cause for concern that this president harbors totalitarian dreams.

New Jersey is well known for electing some of the lamest politicians at all levels from federal to state. Following a quick switch by the Democrat Party when Sen. Robert Torricelli, seeking reelection, was forced off the ballot in 2002 due to some embarrassing ethical revelations, former Senator Frank Lautenberg was put on the ticket and, of course, won. He is 85 years old, making him one of the oldest members in a Congress famous for turning a blind eye to incipient senility.

I provide this thumbnail history because Sen. Lautenberg has introduced S.1317, a bill that would give the Attorney General the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists. These lists, since 9/11, have ballooned, often including people with no connection to terror. The names of people on the watch list are secret and, in effect, this would invest the Attorney General with extraordinary power to limit gun sales.

Moreover, Sen. Lautenberg says he has been frustrated by the FBI’s refusal to disclose to investigators details and specific cases of gun purchases beyond aggregate, general data. Apparently it is not enough that one has to secure a state permit to purchase any weapon these days. In New Jersey, I was fingerprinted in order to do this. Just how much information on gun owners does the Senator need?

Sen. Lautenberg, like his liberal colleagues in Congress and in offices throughout the land, blame guns, not the criminals who use them, for crime. In states that permit the carrying of concealed weapons, the crime rate has fallen. A citizen’s ability to shoot back has a sobering effect on criminals.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is leading the fight against S. 1317 and you should support this effort. History is replete with evidence that wherever gun ownership is banned, totalitarian governments are free to slaughter their own citizens.

There is, however, some good news on the horizon. The Second Amendment Foundation reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will hear the case of McDonald v. City of Chicago to decide whether the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment protects Americans from over-reaching state and local governments.

At issue is a 27-year-old Chicago law banning handguns, requiring the annual taxation of firearms, and generally interfering with the right of law-abiding citizens to keep guns at home for self-defense. In a landmark case last year, District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a law that rendered the District a virtual gun-free zone. Since it is administered by the federal government, the Chicago case will apply nationwide to states and local governments.

A lot is riding on the Chicago case, but in the meantime, Congress must be constantly monitored for its continuing effort to limit the Second Amendment.

Jew Hatred, Fanaticism, and True Believers

By Alan Caruba

On Friday, September 4, I wrote about new efforts by “gun-grabbers” trying to find ways around the Second Amendment. At one point in the commentary I referred to the way the Nazis banned gun ownership and how this contributed to the way German Jews and others were rounded up and systematically murdered in concentration and death camps.

That was quite enough to unhinge some who read the piece and proceeded to email me to dispute the six million figure of Jewish victims that included Jews from all the conquered nations in Europe; one that is commonly agreed upon and cited when mentioning the Holocaust.

Warning: Profane language to follow:

“Hey, Alan, YOU wouldn’t know WHAT it takes to serve this country, you ill-read, cocksucker, so go fuck yourself. Non servium (sic) faggots like you make me sick! I really do suspect you of being a Zionist kike piece of shit, what with your baseless, factless, kike propaganda. Matter of fact, I am going to make you a prime candidate for my wrath and let everyone know what a lying, resourceless cocksucker you are.”

He concluded saying, “if the holocaust actually happened the way the jews say it did, we would be CELEBRATING it instead of DENYING it!”

I will spare you the rest of this rant, but the writer had identified himself as “a marine” in a prior email and I had replied that he was a disgrace to the uniform. For the record, I served in the U.S. Army, so I know what it means to wear my nation’s uniform. If he was or is a Marine, he is a prime candidate for what we used to call a “Section 8” discharge for being a mental case.

It happened that I was re-reading Eric Hoffer’s classic book, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” when the email arrived. If I were to construct a list of books that everyone should read, Hoffer’s would be among them. It is available in softcover from Harper & Row, Perennial Library these days. It was first published in 1951.

“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.”

The fervor that Barack Obama stirred in the 2008 campaign was a tad frightening to those of us familiar with a long line of tyrants from the last century and this one. It’s the reason a lot of parents reacted instinctively to the prospect of his addressing the nation’s school children, complete with Department of Education teacher instructions on how to use this event. This wasn’t Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush issuing greetings at the start of the school year. This reeked of indoctrination.

Hoffer wrote, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he though the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: ‘No…We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.’”

Jews have served this purpose for both Christianity and Islam. They became a convenient and tangible representation of “the enemy” and they retain this status to this day, despite the horror of the Holocaust.

Hoffer wrote at a time when Communism was the predominant mass movement of the age, but he also made frequent mention of Islam in ways that one would call prescient today. “The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.”

The bile and hatred spewed by the writer of the email confirms what Hoffer wrote more than a half-century ago. “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause, but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

Why do I suspect my email correspondent is rushing to his computer this very moment to let loose yet another senseless diatribe about the Jews?

Editor’s Note: A visit to the website of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (http://www.jpfo.org) includes a chart documenting what happens when populations are denied the right to own weapons. Historically, they died in the millions.

The Gun-Grabbers are on the Move Again

By Alan Caruba

Every despotic regime in the last century favored gun control laws. Today, the gun-grabbers are on the move again and are being led by the Obama regime.

During last year’s campaign both Hillary Clinton and John McCain tore into Barack Obama for saying that residents of small-town America "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them out of bitterness over lost jobs.”

Obama quickly retreated from that statement, but it revealed his real thinking and real feelings about people who own guns for any reason, as well as his contempt for people whose religious values are an important part of their lives. In both cases he was condemning large segments of the nation’s population.

In America today, the figure I hear most often is an estimated ninety million people who own guns. No matter the source one cites, there is no question that most Americans have no qualms about owning guns for hunting, sport shooting, or for protection. It is no coincidence that, since Obama’s election last year, gun and ammo sales have been off the chart.

Look back at what history teaches us regarding the right to bear arms. The Soviet Union established gun control in 1929. Unable to defend themselves, the regime killed an estimated twenty million Russian dissidents.

Turkey established gun control in 1911 and, from 1915 to 1917, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were rounded up and killed.

Germany established gun control in 1938. Prior to and throughout World War II, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and another five million others deemed “enemies of the state.” This pattern was repeated in China which outlawed gun ownership in 1935. Gun ownership was outlawed in Guatemala, Uganda, and Cambodia.

It is estimated that 56 million people were killed by their own governments in the last century. Despite that, both England and Australia passed laws prohibiting gun ownership. The result has been a surge in deaths of people who were killed because they were left defenseless against criminals. In Australia, armed robberies increased 44 percent.

As this is being written, there are proposed laws in the House and Senate that would strip Americans of their Second Amendment right to “to keep and bear arms.” A right the Constitution says “shall not be infringed.”

Recently, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) introduced S.1317 that would give the Attorney General the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists. The government’s consolidated watch list, used to identify people suspected of links to terrorists, has now grown to more than a million names since 9/11.

In Lautenberg’s New Jersey, one must have a government issued certificate to purchase a firearm and undergo a difficult process to secure the right to carry a weapon, concealed or otherwise.

A similar law, the Blair Holt Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009 would make it illegal to own a firearm unless you are fingerprinted and can provide a current driver’s license along with your Social Security number. It requires people to submit to a physical and mental evaluation each and every time a firearm is purchased.

In addition, Blair-Holt would require that guns must be locked away and inaccessible to any child under age 18. It would empower law enforcement officers to come into your home to inspect whether or not you are in compliance. Failure to comply includes a fine and incarceration up to five years in prison. In a case of criminal home invasion this law renders the gun owner defenseless.

This replicates the 1938 German Weapons Act that restricted ownership of firearms to “persons whose trustworthyness is not in question and who can show a need for a (gun) permit.”

These proposed laws also abrogate the Fourth Amendment that says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures” shall not be violated without a warrant.

To learn more about these “under the radar” efforts to restrict gun ownership and the right to carry firearms, visit http://www.saf.org/, the website of the Second Amendment Foundation and http://www.ccrkba.org/, the website of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

What I have described are incremental steps taken to ultimately render the Second Amendment null and void.

If you oppose these efforts, you need to write your representatives in Congress and let them know. A donation to the Second Amendment Foundation and/or the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms will assist their efforts on your behalf.

Despite the anti-gun attitude of the current White House I have always found it incongruous that the President is surrounded by men and women in the Secret Service, all of whom carry firearms to protect whoever holds that office. Members of Congress are protected by a Capitol Hill police force, all of whom are armed. We all know that a gun is an essential part of what every police officer wears daily while enforcing the law.

When writing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers first protected free speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom of citizens to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment gave priority to the right to own and bear arms because you cannot have the freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment without those protected in the Second.

The Supreme Court Affirms the Second Amendment

By Alan Caruba

Eighty million Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court struck down the Washington, D.C. ban on gun ownership. Had the Court not supported the Second Amendment that asserts the right of Americans to own guns, the next step would have been efforts to take their guns away and to insure that no one could purchase one for self-defense.

Americans would have gone from being citizens to subjects.

Over the span of thirty years since the ban had been imposed Washington, D.C. had become the murder capital of the nation and, if this lesson has been lost on Americans, then it is surely time to restate it. Where citizens are permitted to own guns and, in those States where they are permitted to carry concealed weapons, the crime rates and, in particular, murder rates fall dramatically.

Some might argue that this is also a racial issue because so much of the violence in our cities is black-on-black with murder cited as a major cause of death among young, black Americans. However, a statement by Project 21, a black activist leadership network has hailed the decision.

“This is a great day for law-abiding citizens of the nation’s capital who have been unjustly been denied their full right to protect themselves and families for over 30 years,” said Project 21’s Deneen Borelli. “Perhaps the government should find a better way to keep illegal guns away from criminals and not law-abiding citizens.”

This Supreme Court decision confirms once again the intention of the Founding Fathers and the intent of the Second Amendment to ensure that Americans have a right to bear arms, i.e., to own guns and to use them for self-defense and as a defense against a government that might turn against its own citizens for the purpose of enslaving them.

The Second Amendment protects not just citizens, but the Constitution because it ensures that it will not be destroyed for those in power who might want to impose a totalitarian regime.

Every day in America, gun owners protect their lives and others against criminals, often by doing nothing more than a show of arms. Where guns are forbidden, the innocent becomes nothing more than victims of criminals and the crazed.

An armed America is a safer America.